He sucks in a breath as I reach between my legs and grip him, wanting to control the man who is uncontrollable. Needing him in the worst way. The best way. In any way.

His eyes flicker with some undecipherable emotion, but I’m so pent up, so preoccupied with what’s going to happen in the next few moments I don’t even give a second thought to what it is.

I release him momentarily and reach between my legs to wet my fingers with the pool of moisture within before encircling his crest and coating it, preparing him physically and showing him figuratively what he does to me, and what exactly I want from him. And my little demonstration weakens all of his restraint.

His fingers dig into my hips and lift me up a little higher as I line him up before he pulls me back down and onto him. We both cry out as our connection is made. As my wet heat stretches past its limits to accommodate his invasion.

And it feels like it’s been so long since he’s filled me, my body has forgotten the pleasurable burn his presence can evoke. “My God,” I breathe as my body takes him in. “I’m so tight,” I tell him, chalking it up to the fact that it’s been over three weeks since we’ve been intimate.

“No, baby,” Colton says, mirth dancing in his eyes as he stills his hips so I can adjust. “I’m just that big.”

The laughter fills my mind but never makes it to my lips before I see a flash of his cocky grin and then his mouth is on mine again. But this time as his kiss claims mine, his hips begin to move, hands begin to guide, and his cock begins to stroke over every attuned inch within my nerve-laden walls. He is in complete control of our movements, our motions, our escalation of sensations.

I lift my head up from its leaning position against the door and take in the sight of him. His own eyes are closed, lips slightly parted, hair mussed from my hands, and shoulder muscles rippling as he moves us in rhythmic motion.

My broken man is now in pure dominant mode, and every nerve in my body screams to be taken. To be made his. To be the one he proves his virility to.

“Fuuuccckkk you feel good,” he tells me as he pushes me up and then plunges back into me as my muscles clench and nerves are paid the attention they most definitely have been craving.

“Colton,” I pant, my fingers digging into the tops of his shoulders as he drives me higher and higher. Sensation spirals—little shock waves of pleasure preparing me for him to shake the earth beneath my feet—and warmth starts to spread like a wildfire through my core. He drives back in again as my thighs tighten around him, my fingernails score lines, and my mouth seeks his with a frenzied need.

It only takes a few more seconds before the pleasure ratchets into an explosion of white in the abyss of darkness that has consumed me. And I am instantly lost to a world beyond our connection. It’s just him and me—sensation overwhelming and breath robbed— as I drown in the liquid heat and lose myself to the feeling, his name a repeated pant from my lips.

Within moments, Colton’s cry breaks through my pleasure induced coma at the same time his hips convulse wildly beneath mine, finding his own release. He rocks back and forth in me a few times trying to draw out the moment, his breath ragged and chest gleaming with our combined sweat.

His body sags against mine as he buries his face into the crook of my neck. My arms wrap around him from my position atop his pelvis and pressed against the door. I absorb the moment—the rapid rise and fall of his chest, the warmth of his breath against my neck, the unmistakable scent of sex—and understand without a doubt that I’d move Heaven and earth for this man without a second thought.

Colton adjusts his grip on my hips, and I slowly lower my feet to the ground; although my head is still figuratively in the clouds. He slips out of me and yet our connection is not lost because he gathers me in his arms, skin to skin, as if he doesn’t want to let me go just yet.

And I’m okay with that because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to let him go either.

“Fuck, I needed that,” he sighs with a slight chuckle and all I can give him is a noncommittal answer because frankly I’m still riding my own high.

We fall silent for a few moments, lost in the moment, enjoying the comforting feel of just being together.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” he says, breaking the silence and shakes his head back and forth before pulling back so he can look at the questioning look on my face.

“Tell you?” I’m confused.

A ghost of a smirk graces his mouth as he brings one hand up to cup the side of my face, his thumb brushing ever so softly over my lips still swollen from his kisses. “What I said to you before I got in the car ...”

My inhaling breath dies and my heart skips a beat, lodging itself in my throat from the words on his lips and the emotion in his eyes. I want to ask him to say it, to tell me the words himself, because hell yes I know what he said, but I want to hear that he remembers those words and still feels the meaning behind them.

I try to control the hitch in my breath and wavering in my voice but I have to ask. “What do you mean?” I’m a horrible liar and I know he can see right through my feigned confusion.

He chuckles a quiet laugh and leans in to brush a tender kiss against my lips and then the tip of my nose before leaning back so he can look into my eyes. He darts his tongue out to wet his lips and says, “I race you, Ryles.”

My heart melts and my soul sighs at hearing him repeat those words I’ve used like glue to bind the broken pieces the crash created. Even though the words bring me peace, I can hear nerves shake his voice, can sense the anxiety in the bottom lip he worries between his teeth. And now I’m starting to get nervous. Did he say the words and now doesn’t feel the same way he did then? I know it’s a ridiculous thought, considering what happened between us moments ago, but the one thing I’ve learned about Colton is that he is anything but predictable.

“Yeah,” I sigh, meeting the temerity in his eyes. “Those words … are you saying them now because you’ve reclaimed the memory or because you still mean them?” There. I’ve laid it out on the table, given him the option to say it’s the former and not the latter—an out in case he no longer races me. In case the accident has changed how he feels and this—us, me and him—have reverted back to a just casual status.

Colton angles his head and studies me a moment, eyes beseeching but lips motionless. The silence stretches as I wait for the answer, as I wait to see if he’ll rip me apart or be the soothing balm to my healing heart.

“Ry … don’t you know I never forget a single moment when I race … on or off the track?” It takes a moment for the words to register, for the words and what they mean to sink in. That he remembers and that he still feels the same way. And the funny thing is now that I know—now that all of this worry can go away and we can move forward—I’m frozen in place.

We’re naked, leaning against a door that a hundred or so reporters are on the other side of, the man I race has just told me that he races me back, and yet all I can do is stare at him as my soul realizes the hope filling it, is finding its permanent home.

Colton leans in so his mouth is a whisper from mine, hands framing my face as he looks into the depths of my soul. “I race you, Rylee,” he says to me, mistaking my silence as not understanding his prior statement. Little does he realize I’m so head over heels in love with him, right here, right now—body naked and heart bared—that I’m robbed of the ability to speak. So instead I accept the brush of his lips over mine in a kiss that’s soft and reverent before he rests his forehead against mine. “Don’t you know?” he asks. “You’re my motherfucking checkered flag.”

I can feel his lips curve up in a smile as they brush against mine, and I let the laughter that bubbles up fall free. It feels so good to suddenly have that thorn removed from my side.

To know the man I love, loves me in return.

To know he’s caught my free-falling heart.

Colton’s hands start the descent back down the line of my spine—the tremor of his right hand so slight now I barely notice it—and then back up as I feel him start to harden again against my lower belly.

“I take it you’ve been cleared from the doc?” I ask, my sated body already thrumming with newfound desire.

“Yeah I did, but after my day,” he says, kissing my forehead and pulling me back into the comfort of his arms, “it didn’t fucking matter if I got the okay or not, I was taking what was mine.”

“What was yours, huh?” I tease him despite the words warming my heart.

“Yep.”

And then the words he said before register and have me pulling back to search for an answer. “What was wrong with your day?”

I see something cloud his eyes momentarily before he pushes it away. “Don’t worry about me,” he says, and I’m immediately concerned.

“What else happened, Colton? Was there something you remembered—something that—”

“No,” he says, quieting me with a press of his lips against mine. “I only remembered what was important. Some voids are still there.” Ever the master of deflection, he continues, “It seems I’ve been neglecting you as of late.”

So whatever is bugging him, he doesn’t want to talk about. Okay … well, then on the heels of the past twenty minutes, I will most definitely give him the unasked for space and not push. “Neglecting me?”

“Yes, not treating you properly,” he says as he slaps my butt; the sting it leaves has nothing on the shock waves that ripple through the hypersensitive flesh between my thighs. “You’ve been taking care of me—of everyone else but yourself as usual—and I haven’t properly taken care of you.”